How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities

Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be decided by America’s suburbanites. From Florida to Virginia on across the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic. All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’ interest? The answer emphatically is no.

As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor. Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in office goes to show.

President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities. It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired before the election. But like a lot of his major progressive policy innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily–mostly through rule-making, appointment, and vague directives. Obama has worked on this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original community organizing mentors. Kruglik’s new group, Building One America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs. Kruglik’s group also favors a raft of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities.

Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s efforts. A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals. These are, of course, code words. “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities. It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into requirements for further federal aid. In fact, his administration has already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on reluctant states. Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.

Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father. Few have noticed the little digs at suburban “sprawl” throughout the book, as when Obama decries a Waikiki jammed with “subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green hill.” Dreams actually begins with the tale of an African American couple who’ve come to question their move from city to suburb – the implication clearly being that the city is the moral choice.

Early on in Dreams, Obama tells of how his mother and Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, were pulled apart by a proxy version of the American dream. Lolo got a job with an American oil company, bought a house in a better neighborhood, and started dining at the company club. Obama’s mother, who had come to Indonesia in search of Third World authenticity, wanted nothing to do with the “ugly American” types who frequented this new world, and she taught her son to disdain them as well. From Obama’s perspective, American-inspired upward mobility had broken his new family in two.

Back in Hawaii after his Indonesian interlude, Obama came to see his grandparents as strangers. The realization dawned as they drove him along a sprawl-filled highway. Obama then threw in his lot with an African-American mentor named Frank Marshall Davis, who lived in a ramshackle pocket of the city called the “Waikiki Jungle” where his home was a gathering place for young leftists and nonconformists. Rejecting assimilation into America’s middle-class, Davis hit on socialist politics and identification with the urban poor as the way to establish his racial credentials.

Dreams from My Father describes Davis’s efforts to pass this stance on to Obama. At Occidental, with Davis’s advice in mind, Obama worried that he was too much like “suburban blacks, students who sit with whites in the cafeteria and refuse to be defined by the color of their skin.” This fear of becoming a middle-class suburban “sellout” is the background to the famous passage of Dreams where Obama explains why he started hanging out with “Marxist professors” and other unconventional types. Recalling Davis’s admonition to reject the standard path to success, “the American way and all that shit,” Obama left Occidental’s suburban campus for Columbia University, “in the heart of a true city.”

After leaving New York for Chicago, Obama met up with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. This relationship, too, reflected Obama’s ideological disdain for the suburbs. Obama was distressed, for example, to learn that one of Wright’s assistants planned to move to a suburb for her son’s safety. After confronting Wright with concerns that his congregation was “too upwardly mobile,” Obama was mollified to discover the congregation’s official “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” The years with Rev. Wright helped Obama solidify the solution to his identity crisis that Frank Marshall Davis had taught him long before: reject the lure of the middle-class suburbia and identify instead with the urban poor.

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This is an absurd article. The suburban sprawl has been massively subsidized, and could not ever exist without things like the infrastructure which has been built to support it, and also by destroying the environment, a destruction that is largely unpriced.

If you want to read about why we need to stop building suburbs and getting back to living in healthy, safe vibrant cities (like everyone in Europe or Japan does) read something by Peter Calthorpe or Anthony Downs. (I suggest the books Stuck in Traffic and Still Stuck in Traffic)

This article reflects an anti-community bias that reflects a primitive libertarian atomism in which society as we know it could not exist.

An Agenda 21′er!!! Thats what you are. And no I will not leave my rural community to go live in a city. I was born in the city and left when I was 17. I love the rural areas because of the rivers where I can go swimming and lay on a rock. My high tech job is here. I like trees all around me. I take care of the forest I play in. I can ride my motorcycle on the twisty roads without get hit by a car like in a city… The air is better. My health is better because there is space to move around. And its natural.

The problem is energy. Oil is OUT. New forms of energy(LENR- E_CAT, Bruillion) will change the cost of living in a spread out fashion. New forms of transport like air cars or even teleporters make it possible to live in the suburbs and rural areas more efficiently.. Healthy safe vibrant cities….. You have no idea what the heck you are talking about. Go get a real life. Learn how to think critically and get off welfare.

This is an absurd article. The suburban sprawl has been massively subsidized, and could not ever exist without things like the infrastructure which has been built to support it, and also by destroying the environment, a destruction that is largely unpriced.

If you want to read about why we need to stop building suburbs and get back to living in healthy, safe vibrant cities (like everyone in Europe or Japan does) read something by Peter Calthorpe or Anthony Downs. (I suggest the books Stuck in Traffic and Still Stuck in Traffic)

This article reflects an anti-community bias that reflects a primitive libertarian atomism in which society as we know it could not exist.

Despite all his overwrought rhetoric, the author fails to identify even one policy statute or piece of legislation that actually gives one dime of money from the suburbs to the cities. Like most right wingers, he accuses Obama of imaginary wealth redistribution to distract the public from the huge redistribution of wealth actually proposed by the Republicans, from the poor and the elderly (through cuts to Medicare and Medicaid) from the Middle Class (through elimination of tax deductions for employer paid health insurance and mortgage interest and reductions in student loans) to the wealthy (through massive reduction in the tax rates for those in the highest tax margin and radical reduction or elimination of capital gains taxes). The rights efforts to cover it up with accusations of wealth redistribution against the Democrats are like a man choking his wife while calling for help from the police.

Despite all his overwrought rhetoric, the author fails to identify even one policy statute or piece of legislation that actually gives one dime of money from the suburbs to the cities. Like most right wingers, he accuses Obama of imaginary wealth redistribution to distract the public from the huge redistribution of wealth actually proposed by the Republicans, from the poor and the elderly (through cuts to Medicare and Medicaid) from the Middle Class (through elimination of tax deductions for employer paid health insurance and mortgage interest and reductions in student loans) to the wealthy (through massive reduction in the tax rates for those in the highest tax margin and radical reduction or elimination of capital gains taxes). The rights efforts to cover it up its own grand theft with accusations of wealth redistribution against the Democrats are like a man choking his wife while calling for help from the police.

Currently city dwellers pay for/subsidize many things in the suburbs. Suburb dwellers need longer roads and drive more than packed city dwellers and the roads are mostly paid for by income taxes paid by both city and suburb dwellers but used more by suburb. Suburb dwellers come into the city and use its resources more than city dwellers go to the suburbs and use its resources. Political conservatism is really about conserving the current system of subsidies (and liberalism seems to be about adding competing subsidies). We have no fiscally conservative small government political party we have parties that want to spend other (mostly future) peoples money on the things they each like.

This is the most ridiculous and just plain wrong thing I have read since Sarah Palin said Obama’s health reform called for death panels to kill granny. This policy and the article, have nothing to do with race. It’s about who pays for you to have freedom of choice. In every way possible, poor suburban design is the most expensive use of all possible resources. It encourages inefficient use of fuel, roads and infrastructure. It lowers quality of life in multiple ways – wastes people’s time sitting in traffic, increases pollution, reduces greenspace and disconnects people from their neighbors and communities.

People are lured to the suburbs with the promise of cheap real estate and taxes, but are now finding that low density and low taxes cannot support the necessary infrastructure. After all, 100 houses spread over 10 square miles, require almost the same infrastructure as 500 in the same space. As someone who pays very high real estate and property tax costs to live in the city of Atlanta, I can assure you, I am subsidizing those jokers in their suburban McMansions, not the other way around. This policy attaches the real costs of the suburbs to the users, and it’s about time.

It amazes me how far one will go to support their personal notion or perception about someone or something, and I am baffled as to why such a seemingly educated man would spend his time analyzing Obama and even writing a book on the matter. My grandmother (who, by the way, had little education) told me a long time ago – people fear and are threatened by people and things they don’t quite understand… people who are unfamiliar to them. Poor Stanley. All he wants to do is spread more fear about who he thinks Obama really is, and get back to the way things were when we just followed like a flock of sheep under Bush.

Are you saying that we should take one random quote from your uneducated grandmother and use it to ignore an educated man with expertise in this field? We, I submit, are not the sheep in this scenario.

I have studied and understand a great deal about Obama and that is why I am deeply concerned about his policies. If I didn’t understand him, I would not be worried.